Yuval Noah Harari: This Election Will Tear The Country Apart! AI Will Control You By 2034! The Dark Truth Behind Meta & X!

Yuval Noah Harari (0:00)

The humans are still more powerful than the AIs. The problem is that we are divided against each other, and the algorithms are using our weaknesses against us. And this is very dangerous, because once you believe that people who don't think like you are your enemies, democracy collapses, and then the election becomes like a war. So if something ultimately destroys us, it will be our own delusions, not the AIs.

Steven Bartlett (0:23)

We have a big election in the United States.

Yuval Noah Harari (0:24)

Yes, and democracy in the States is quite fragile. But the big problem is, what if…

Steven Bartlett (0:30)

Surely that will never happen.

SPEAKER_3 (0:32)

Yuval Noah Harari, the author of some of the most influential non-fiction books in the world today, and is now at the forefront of exploring the world-shaping power of AI and how it is beyond anything humanity has ever faced before.

Steven Bartlett (0:43)

Being a social narwhax in the world, they're effectively going to go for free speech. What is your take on that?

Yuval Noah Harari (0:48)

The issue is not the humans. The issue is the algorithms. So let me unpack this. In the 2010s, there was a big battle between algorithms for human attention. Now, the algorithms discovered, when you look at history, the easiest way to grab human attention is to press the fear button, the hate button, the greed button. The problem is that there was a misalignment between the goal that was defined to the algorithm and the interests of human society. But this is how it becomes really disconcerting. Because if so much damage was done by giving the wrong goal to a primitive social media algorithm, what would be the results with AI in 20 or 30 years?

Steven Bartlett (1:24)

So what's the solution?

Yuval Noah Harari (1:26)

We've been in this situation many times before in history, and the answer is always the same, which is Are you optimistic? I try to be a realist.

Steven Bartlett (1:42)

10 years ago, you made a video that was titled, Why Humans Run The World. It's a very well-known TED Talk that you did. After reading your new book, Nexus, I wanted to ask you a slightly modified question, which is, do you still believe that 10 years from now, humans will fundamentally be running the world?

Yuval Noah Harari (2:05)

I'm not sure. It depends on the decisions we all take in the coming years, but there is a chance that the answer is no. That in 10 years, algorithms and AIs will be running the world. I'm not having in mind some kind of Hollywoodian science fiction scenario of one big computer kind of conquering the world. It's more like a bureaucracy of AIs that we will have millions of AI bureaucrats everywhere, in the banks, in the government, in businesses, in universities, making more and more decisions about our lives.

Every day there's decisions whether to give us a loan, whether to accept us to a job, and we will find it more and more difficult to understand the logic, the rationale why the algorithm refused to give us a loan, why the algorithm accepted somebody else for the job. You still have democracies with people voting for this president or this prime minister. But if most of the decisions are made by AIs and humans, including the politicians, have difficulty understanding the reason why the AIs are making a particular decision, then power will gradually shift from humanity to these new alien intelligences.

Steven Bartlett (3:30)

Alien intelligences?

Yuval Noah Harari (3:32)

Yeah, I prefer to think about AI. I know that the acronym is artificial intelligence, but I think it's more accurate to think about it as an alien intelligence, not in the sense of coming from outer space, in the sense that it makes decisions in a fundamentally different way than human minds. Artificial means or have the sense that we design it, we control it, something artificial is made by humans. With each passing year, AI is becoming less and less artificial, and more and more alien. Yes, we still design the kind of baby AIs, but then they learn and they change, and they start making unexpected decisions, and they start coming up with new ideas, which are alien to the human way of doing things.

You know, there is this famous example with the game of Go, that in 2016, AlphaGo defeated the world champion, Li Sedol. But the amazing thing about it was the way it did it, because humans have been playing Go for 2,500 years.

Steven Bartlett (4:41)

A board game.

Yuval Noah Harari (4:42)

A board game, a strategy game developed in ancient China, and considered one of the basic arts that any cultivated, civilized person in East Asia had to know. And tens of millions of Chinese and Koreans and Japanese played Go for centuries. Entire philosophies developed around the game of how to play it. It was considered a good preparation for politics and for life. And people thought that they explored the entire realm, the entire geography landscape of Go.